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You'd think winning a Nobel Prize would be something you would probably know about, but
Professor Peter Higgs said he had no idea that he'd won a prize until a woman congratulated
him on the street. The 84-year-old scientist, who doesn't own a mobile phone, won a Nobel Physics
Prize for his particle theory and said a former neighbour had told him as of the news.
I was walking along Harriet Road when a car pulled up across the road and a lady in her
60s or 70s got out and introduced herself as a former neighbour, a widow of a judge
who died recently, and congratulated me on the news. I said 'what news?'
And she told me that her daughter had phoned from London to alert her to the fact that
I had got this prize. I heard more about it obviously when I got home and started reading
the messages.
Well, I am obviously delighted and rather relieved that it is all over as it has been
a long time coming.
The professor at the University of Edinburgh published his landmark research in 1964, and
was originally tipped to win a Nobel Prize in the 1980s. The Higgs Theory explains how
particles clumped together to form stars, planets and life itself. The theory suggests
that without the Higgs particle, the other particles that make up the universe would
have remained similar to a formless soup.